Mass Email Marketing: Cold Outreach and Avoiding the Spam Box

In this Surge Session, we discuss how to perform mass email marketing and cold outreach lead generation while avoiding the spam boxes, as well as how to write bulk sequences that get responses from your prospects. Our CEO Duran Inci is joined by our Director of Marketing, Joseph Hassun, and Marketing Specialist, Carlo Ricordi.

Is Mass Email Marketing and Cold Outreach Still Profitable in 2019?

In Europe, guidelines are pretty strict but in the United States, you are still able to do cold email outreach. You can leverage tools like Mailem.io, Woodpecker, Mailshake, and Outreach.io.

We’ve been getting requests from clients for mass email marketing, so we wanted to do this Surge Session and we cover this topic.

If you are not doing double opt-in emails through a system like Constant Contact or Mailchimp, where your double opt-ins are handled by the email system, 90% of the time you are going to fall into the spam box. Especially if you don’t do the checklist of the email marketing strategy. This is true for eCommerce companies, this is true for B2B, this is true for so many different businesses.

When starting off with email outreach, you need to see what your email copy needs to look like, what your technology needs to look like, and also what your strategy needs to look like. A lot of people do it as a one-off. They say “We’re gonna send an email to 200000 people, we’re kind of fishing and let’s see how things go” and what we are saying is “No, do not do that or stop doing that.”

So if we’re working on cold email outreach strategies, the most important part is your ability to personalize and customize these emails. We’ve seen that having personalization in the email header, being able to include the first name or the company, has been able to increase open rates.

We’ve seen that encouraging engagement, encouraging them to reply, rather than sending them to a landing page right away or trying to sell right away, is the best way to get the conversation going and increase your chance of making an actual conversion at the end. Also, you want to have a drip marketing campaign set in place to nurture that lead and to build that relationship between client and seller.

Moving on to drip marketing campaigns, follow up works very well with email marketing. With drip marketing, you have the ability to set up different drip funnels. For example, if you see that a particular user opens an email and engages with that email for a specific service, you are then able to tailor the following emails based on that service that they’re interested in. So it’s a more tailored approach that then leads to a better result.

How to Avoid Having Your Domain Name Blocked When Doing Mass Cold Email Outreach

This whole Surge Session was prompted by a couple of clients asking some questions about mass email marketing. We do email marketing for a couple of big brands in the U.S and Latin America. We send millions of emails on a monthly basis. So we know about deliverability and we get these questions about client domain names being blocked.

If you’re going to do cold outreach and you’re going to send mass emails, you have to make sure that you register a second domain name to send it from and you have to make sure that you warm up your IP. The only system we know that does a really good job with this and is also the system we use, is Mailgun.

The problem with mail gun, however, is that Mailgun is API based, which means it only works for code. However, there’s a tool that we’ve actually developed called Mailem.io that you can use to leverage as a Mailgun UX/UI Client. But there’s a specific process you need to follow, certain steps you need to take.

You have to register a new domain name. You have to warm up the IP before you start sending tens of thousands of emails. You have to make sure to personalize your first name, last name and your copy needs to be really good as well.

Do not just email people offering your services, you have to provide some value in the email. You have to have a value proposition for the person you are emailing, otherwise, you are just spamming them.

You need to always have a non-subscribe button as well as your address in the email copy because this is going to legitimize your email. Never ever send emails from a Gmail or a Hotmail account. You have to have your own domain name, possibly one using Google apps.

What are the Benefits of Bulk Email Marketing and Cold Outreach?

Moving onto the benefits of cold email outreach, essentially you are just expanding your reach plus it is cost effective. It will easily cost you more to reach those individuals through any other medium. It might come off as a little spammy but at the end of the day, if you convert one or two of those leads, you’ve made a good return investment.

From a business standpoint, it’s a good opportunity. We do cold email outreach and we get incredible results from it because these are people that would otherwise never see us. These are people that are never searching on Google. They don’t have their information on Facebook.

But nevertheless, your copy needs to be really good and you have to most importantly fall into the inbox.

Now, viewing this from the user standpoint, we hate spam. We get so much of it. How can you make it less spammy? By providing value, as we said earlier. Provide value within the email without asking for anything in return. A lot of times, what comes out as spammy is right off the bat getting asked for any type of information, for a response, for something in return.

So make sure to provide value, possibly send them something that they can use, such as a tool, a checklist, an informative video. Something they will see as a resource like an audit, or an analysis of their website, of their business.

There are three things you need to have for a sale to take place. You have to have pain, budget, and decision. Pain meaning you have to establish some sort of pain and provide value. Budget means they have to have money. Decision means you have to be speaking to the decision makers.

So when you’re sending these emails, don’t send to 10 different people’s emails in one company. Do your research, find the CEO, find the decision maker, and only send emails to those people, to the decision makers.

So from a cold email outreach standpoint, there’s a thin line. If you do it right, it provides value, it’s not spam. If you do it wrong, it’s spam.

How to Build Mass Email Lists for Lead Generation

Now let’s talk about another side of things which are the requests we get. We have clients who have tens of thousands of customers. It’s internal, they are all opt-in, and they are not doing a great job at it.

The latest request we got was “Hey our emails are not going to our clients.” So when we dig deep, we find out that their salespeople, from their Gmail accounts or Google Suite accounts, were sending tens of thousands of emails and they were CC-ing everybody. So everybody that they were sending the emails saw each other and they fell into the spam folder and the domain was blacklisted and marked as a spam domain.

You don’t have to be sending cold email outreach if you’re doing any kind of email follow up with eCommerce or B2B. You have to make sure that your team, your salespeople, your internal team, are educated on how to send these emails.

The last part of the puzzle for you to be doing any kind of cold email outreach is you have to have a mailing list. You have to find people that are decision makers, do your research and have a list of people to email.

If you are not doing mass email, you can use a tool like Mailshake or Woodpecker. But if you want to do mass email and you have a list of over 5,000 emails, here are the steps:

First of all, you have to have your infrastructure ready.

Second, you have to absolutely validate those emails, if you don’t validate the emails, I guarantee 40 percent of them are gonna bounce and within the first 500 emails that you send, you’re gonna fall into the spam folder.

Thirdly, if you’re going to get tens of thousands of these lists, is leveraging the right tools, such as BuiltWith and Hunter, to find lists of companies and decision makers.

Decision makers are the key here. You need to make sure the email validates and you are sending your emails to a decision maker. Let us know if you have any questions regarding the topics we covered in this or any previous Surge Session.

Need help creating an email outreach strategy? Want more information on the best tools and practices for effective mass email marketing?